HUSKER DU V. Replacements

Hmm. Replacements wrote songs that have & had devastating emotional effects on me, and got me thru some difficult times when I discovered them as an undergrad.

Husker Du is far better at obliterating me sonically, and so far more into my realm of what i want music to be like, with hypersonics and a wide spectrum of distorted harmonics, the kind that link up with Dino Jr/MBV/Pixies/Nirvana. They far more inform the kind of music that i would personally make, too.

Let It Be as an album, Husker Du as a catalog. I can still listen and enjoy every album, but I can't really stand the last coupla Mats albums(singles aside).

Husker Du by far. But while Metal Circus and Zen Arcade sound okay, but the rest of their recordings sound like shite. So if/when Merge or Ryko reissues them, will the remasters help? Is there hope? The Meat Puppets and Dinosaur Jr. fared well...

'Mats by far. But I'm a sicko who likes All Shook Down (but not Don't Tell a Soul). i bought New Day rising when it came out and liked four songs. The Mats bootlegs I've heard are better than their albums. The Husker boots sound like putting your head in an incinerator...too loud, maybe? recorders didn't capture it...

<i>Don't Tell a Soul</i> is Replacements most underrated album by far -- bad production (man, they had three shit-sounding records in a row there, Pleased is OK but drums are way too loud), and the Goo Goo Dolls kinda developed their later sound out of it, but I look at the track list now and remember how in love I was with it when it first came out and if my copy were still around I bet it would hold up.

Don't Tell A Soul is great, and worth tracking down again (probably available for 1 cent online, it was bargain bin shortly after it came out). "Talent Show" is one of my favorite album openers, esp. when the drums come in. "Achin' To Be" holds up; I even love "We'll Inherit The Earth" which I reckon drew battlelines for longtime Mats fans. And "I'll Be You" is a great single.

i like that record. wrote an embarrassingly enthusiastic review of it for my college paper (i think i was mostly excited to be writing about the replacements), but it holds up ok. lyrics get kinda shaky -- i think paul read too many articles calling him a poet -- but the songs are pretty nice.

I liked DTAS at the time too. That bit on 'Rock'n'Roll Ghost' where Westerberg's voice breaks down a little, dunno if that was planned or spontaneous or what, but that always moved me. 'Talent Show' is a great song too, but I don't remember all that much about the rest of the record now.

Gotta go with Husker Du, whose music at its best sounded like it was busting through the atmosphere.

I have never understood the appeal of Husker Du at all. They're a hardcore band but they're not that intense or crazy. They've got pop hooks but they aren't memorable. They experiment in the studio but everything sounds thin and shitty. And Bob Mould's lyrics and voice are awful.

Zen Arcade [SST, 1984]
I'll swear on a stack of singles that "Turn on the News" could rouse as much rabble as "London Calling" or "Anarchy in the U.K." I play side three for pleasure and side two for catharsis. And I get a kick out of the whole fucking thing, right down to the fourteen-minute guitar showcase/mantra that finishes it off. But though I hate to sound priggish, I do think it could have used a producer. I mean, it was certainly groovy (not to mention manly) to record first takes and then mix down for forty hours straight, but sometimes the imperfections this economical method so proudly incorporates could actually be improved upon. It wouldn't be too much of a compromise to make sure everyone sings into the mike, for instance, and it's downright depressing to hear Bob Mould's axe gather dust on its way from vinyl to speakers. Who knows, put them in the studio with some hands-off technician--Richard Gottehrer, Tony Bongiovi, like that--and side two might even qualify as cathartic music rather than cathartic noise. A-

Very funny, from Mark Prindle's website a review of a Replacements bootleg:

Any fan of The Replacements should own this. The rarities are key - KEY - to understanding why Paul Westerberg's solo work is a little sketchier than his band material. It's bacuz he ALWAYS wrote songs like this, but used to have the inimitable creativity to back it up with incredible melodies time and time again. He STILL pulls it off quite a bit - he's just not as invincible as he used to be. He's too old for this shit. A buddy film with him in it would be opportune. He could star with Bob Mould as a couple of former Minneapolis rock stars who get paired together as rookie policemen. No! Paul could be the rookie policeman who's paired with an older GAY partner. Bob is close to retirement and gay but he's agreed to do one more case for the Chief. And Paul Westerberg keeps messing up because he's so excited and nervous about his new job. And Dave Pirner could be the bad guy who steals thousands of dollars worth of jewels from the nightclub, which is generally where jewels are kept. And Prince could play a hilarious Martin Short-esque character who runs around screaming and flapping his arms up and down effiminately. Maybe an anvil could fall on his head and little birdies could start flying around in a circle as he passes out. And then The Cows could come in and the action could stop for several hours while, at my insistence (I play the hardboiled but good-hearted bartender), they play every single song in their catalog, including "Danny Is A Faggot."

I dig the aesthetic of a lot of Spot's productions for SST. Listen with headphones and they're a whole lot better -- enveloping, or 'gelatinous' as he termed it himself. Zen Arcade sounds fantastic through headphones to me.

But remastering could help bring out their better qualities, for sure. (According to Jack Brewer, at least some of SST's CD output was transferred from the vinyl, not the master tapes. Eek.)

or land speed record for that matter. sheesh, data control is one of my all time fave intense crazy punk moments ever.

i never had a problem with the sound of zen arcade. i thought it sounded cool then and now. new day rising was harsher when it came to the intheredness of the guitars. i dunno. it's how they sounded. they sounded kinda fucked. it never bothered me much.

The 'mats were one of my half-dozen favourite bands at one point, but that point was 20 years ago, and I lost interest after I quit working at the college radio station. Their shambolic lovable-loser persona seemed to become more self-consciously forced, and the post-Bob Stinson LPs were dismal. If Twin/Tone ever reissued their entire catalog on a coupla shiny remastered twofers, I'd probably buy them. But rarely would I play 'em.

The Huskers (also among my favourites) I never stopped loving. Twice as many great songs/songwriters and one of the alltime-great noise-guitarists. And I don't think their records sounded THAT bad. (At least, not all of 'em.)

With a lot of musicians, like, for instance, Elvis or the Beatles, the legend, which may draw you in at first, eventually goes bad and starts to interfere with your ability to enjoy the music. This is one reason reason why somebody (like edd s hurt for example) can prefer the cooler, more abstract, more detached sound of the Byrds to that of the more eager to please Beatles (cf nabisco on this subject)- for one thing you don't have as much to feel guilty about when the thrill is a little bit gone. If you stay away for a while, or listen in smaller doses you can usual rehabilitate and relearn to enjoy the music. The ratio of The Replacements looming legend versus their actual recorded output presents a real problem in this regard.

lol, yeah. i get caught up in the typing and forget to thimk. add a seperate category for "southwest" i guess...

It occurs to me that this was "MY MUSIC", the post-hardcore 70's revival moment. This is the sound that introduced me to a world larger than the radio, MTV and my friends' & parents' record collections. I loved all the bands & albums mentioned up above, along with associated & similar stuff like Camper Van Beethoven, Violent Femmes, The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Pixies, Pussy Galore, Halo of Flies and Mudhoney. All of it seemed like punk to me, or like a version of punk I could relate to and make my own. As embarrassed as I am to admit it, I saw this music an "artful" version of punk, one "liberated" from the tiresome loud-fast orthodoxy and polemical simplicity I associated with 77 punkrock and American hardcore. It fit together in my head with the Nuggets & Back From the Grave comps; with The Stooges, Dolls & Ramones; freakazoid outliers like Chrome & F/i; and Aussie shit like The Saints, Scientists & Radio Birdman.

What seems strange now is simply the fact that this music seemed so radically adventurous and forward-thinking to me at the time. It's clear in retrospect that it was simply an attempt to forge a connection between punk rock, itself already becoming dated, and what punk had supposedly replaced. I flirted with more genuinely futuristic stuff like Skinny Puppy, Sonic Youth (and their Blast First sistren) and weird new trends in club music. I liked a lot of fairly straightforward punk-punk like Naked Raygun, Squirrel Bait, the Didjits and Husker Du, spent time with the thrash, speed and crossover metal my sketchier friends dug, but crit-approved revivalist rock-as-punk was MY SHIT. I wasn't inclined to follow Big Black into the Wax Trax scene, Foetus & Skinny Puppy into industrial goth, Voivod into death metal, or MARRS into house. Instead, I followed the children of Redd Kross into indie rock. GBV here we come...

No regrets, but there's something kind of funny about my naivete when I look back on it now. I was so certain that this was THEE MUSIC OV THEE FUTURE!

That'd get you to around 53 minutes. I've left out songs that most everyone else loves--never cared for either their overly jokey side, or their loungey stuff--so maybe so one else can fill out the rest.

I just happened to hear the demo of "Answering Machine" and I still can't figure out how the hell he plays it. Is there a tuning chart somewhere? Sounds great as demo as well, though lyrics are still in progress...